Author Archives: PabloBcn

Treehouse is an online interactive education platform that offers courses in web, mobile and business development. It surprised me to find in their library a specific course called “Build an Interactive Story App”. That’s right! A course on how to build a choose-your-own-adventure kind of app, complete with illustrations.

It goes step by step, developing an example story called “Signals from Mars”, an app you can find in Google Play for free – several times, seemingly for all the students that uploaded it when making their tests. The story is a very short and simple CYOA with illustrations, about a ship receiving the mysterious signal mentioned in the title. The illustrations look cool, though.

The course, designed for people who have already some basic notions on Android, teaches how to process user input, design the structure of our story and give the finishing touches to our user interface. It seems a good opportunity for those – like me – who secretly wanted to bring some new stories to your phone. Now you don’t have any excuse to get those creative juices flowing!

Westward Dystopia is a gamebook from Greek Winter Media. While it started being an application for the Android mobile OS, after a recent and successful crowfunding in Kickstarter, it will also see the light as a printed book and an ebook.

As the name says, Westward Dystopia leads us to a post-apocalyptic world, several hundreds of years after a mysterious event called “the Razing“, that turned the world into a radioactive wasteland. If, after reading these lines, we can think of well known franchises of the genre such as Mad Max, it is no coincidence. The author, Jeffrey Dean, has been clearly inspired by the post-apocalyptic fantasies of the eighties, with their ruins and their hordes of mutants. Nevertheless, the world developed by Jeffrey Dean has a good number of original ideas.

To begin with, we will find no car chases in the middle of the desert, or great arsenals of weapons. The Razing arrived long time ago, and most of the technology of the previous world has dissappeared. The few who still preserve and learn from that technology, artifact seekers like our protagonist, or a mysterious organization called the Guild of Technomancers, do what they can to keep those discoveries in the hands of a very few. So, for most of the population of the wasteland, any pre-Razing object is considered a kind of magic. In this sense, the world of Westward Dystopia reminds me a bit of the role playing game Numenera, with its conception of technology as magic, and the great ruins of forgotten civilizations full of traps and powerful discoveries.

And what exactly is our story about? Our main character is an artifact hunter, who has to obtain the key that will allow him to get inside the protective barrier of the ruins of an ancient city. Those who obtain that key will have access to the whole technology hidden in the city, which means to incline the balance of power greatly for whichever faction who gets it. Initially, our objective will be to hand over this power to the High Lords of the city of Benaeron, the ruling class of said city, who have promised us enough richness to live in peace for the rest of our lives.

At the same time, other groups are trying to stop us. Some mysterious mercenaries have been hired to eliminate us at the beginning of our story, and the Guild of Technomancers, an organization we were part of but we flew from once they discovered we were a Shaper – a kind of mutant with powers of energetic manipulation -, is also behind our tracks.

The story is more than 120.000 words long. It has been designed to allow great replayability. We will be able to discover many secret places and hidden aspects for the many characters we’ll find. Another nice touch where I could see the attention for detail in this gamebook is in the endings; Not only there are 6 “good” endings, some of them radically different from the others, but also every single “bad” ending has a specific written section. No matter how good or bad we make it, there will always be an ending for our story.

I think that one of the most interesting aspects of this story is in our character. A mercenary who sells his work to the powerful in order to survive, but questions the morality of what he does and, as we can often read between the lines, asks himself if it’s worth offering such a powerful technology to those who make the life of the population miserable. We see through his internal monologues how he condemns himself for having to take specific decisions, even if they are necessary for his objectives. Deep inside, he’d like to live in a fairer world, and resents the circumstances that force him to be evil.

That’s why, even though I’ve really enjoyed this story, I think I will enjoy the next ones even more. I get the feeling that Jeffery Dean is going to dig deeper in the societies of the wasteland, and all those themes – so uncommon for gamebooks – as the consequences and the morality of our actions in an unfair world, will be developed in more detail.

In short, Westward Dystopia is a great story, well written and full of details. I have yet to read another review for this gamebook, and that surprises, because I feel this story deserves more attention.

It could be that the looks of this Android app have discouraged buyers; even if the app is well tested and does what it needs to be done, the interface isn’t as “flashy” as those of other companies like Tin Man Games, with all the fancy 3D dices. Also, the drawings by David White, even if they are appropiate and grow on you the more you look at them, they are less “spectacular” or “sexy” than those of other companies. That’s why I’d like to encourage giving an opportunity to this work to those who didn’t find it attractive at first sight. With some good stories, it’s when getting immersed in them when we discover what they really have to offer, and Westward Dystopia is no exception.

And, if reading on a phone screen is not of our liking, be on the lookout for the next edition on ebook and paper!

Telltale games, an American independent digital publisher devoted to the development of graphic adventure games in an episodic fashion, has started a new series called “Game of Thrones“, based on the popular cycle of fantasy novels “A Song of Ice and Fire” by George R.R. Martin. It joins several other series developed by this company, based on popular licensed properties, either in comic books, cinema or television (“The Walking Dead“, “Jurassic Park” or “Back to the Future“) or videogames (“Monkey Island“, “Sam & Max” or the upcoming “Minecraft: story mode“).

What makes this series interesting for this blog is the kind of focus they wanted to give to the story. Although there have been several action scenes included, most of the interaction in the story lies in taking some specific choices. Difficult decisions, dialogues, with characters… Rather than fighting or shooting our way through the story, here the focus is in the characters and their interactions. Through those decisions – and their inevitable consequences – we will outline one of the many possible stories. As we can see, what Telltale games aims to do with this “Game of Thrones” is bringing the kind of narratives we can find in interactive fiction or gamebooks to the world of graphic adventure games.

Visually, this “Game of Thrones” is clearly inspired by the HBO series of the same name, but it offers something different to the fan of the series by delving into a part of the epic that neither the television series nor the novels dig very deeply; the story of the Forresters clan, only briefly referenced in the books.

At this moment, there are three finished episodes of a planned total of six. You can find their website

“Restless Heart of Evil“, by Marc J. Wilson, is the first volume on the series “Dangerous Worlds Gamebooks“. It has been another example of a gamebook series having used a crowdfunding platform successfully (Kickstarter, in this case) managing to obtain 3427£ of an initial request of 2000£.

What Marc J. Wilson proposes with this series is adapting the gamebook media to the current age of their readers; if gamebook series back in the decade of the 80s were destined to young readers, with this series Marc aims to adapt the same themes to those same old fans, who have already reached the thirties. The characters of these stories aren’t “sons of kings or great wizards”, but simple adventurers struggling in grim worlds of dark fantasy or dystopian futures, just to survive in many cases. Also, the content pretends to be more “grown-up”, not shying away from descriptions of violence.

Does this “Restless Heart of Evil” honor those objectives? For starters, the story places us in the role of an ex-mercenary and ex-slave with a hard childhood – his mother died when giving him birth, and he discovered as a child the corpse of his father, a merchant, who hanged himself after loosing all his possessions on a shipwreck – that was bought on a slave market by the professor Hyeronimus Kroos. He provided him with the education he was always denied, and turned him into a trusted servant and friend. When the story begins, the professor has sent a letter to our protagonist asking him to bring some volumes from his library to the city of Deva. And there we go by ship when the narration starts.

This gamebookuses a diceless system, similar to those of other gamebooks, like “Necklace of Skulls” or “Heart of Ice” by Dave Morris, where the result of our actions is totally deterministic. It depends on the character creation process, where we divide some points between attributes, on the gifts (special capabilities) we have selected, our decisions and the objects and knowledge we have been able to obtain throughout our adventure. Personally I tend to prefer these kind of systems, to those where some bad dice rolls can play havoc with a whole series of good decisions, although here the preferences may be different depending on who – for example, Marc. J. Wilson has already announced that the next volumes on the series will use a different system using dice, at the request of most of his readers.

The background of this story, the city of Devas, is very well constructed. Here we aren’t talking about a world of generic fantasy, with heroes and villians. The city is a place of deep inequalities, corruption, and many different factions fighting for power. A city with an interesting history – it was an ancient elven city abandoned by their original builders, and there are still traces of the old elvish buildings and, as we will discover later on, their dangerous catacombs.

It’s a city that feels alive, evolving all through the book. Several events will change the places we can access to, and what we will find when we arrive to them. As we go deeper in the plot and discover the sinister conspirancy that will put at risk the destine of the city, we will know also its darkest aspects, and we will live the horror and violence on the streets, described with all detail.

The writing of this work is excellent, allowing us to bring ourselves to this complex, dark and violent world. If only, at some points it tends to abuse stereotypes when describing its characters. But it is forgivable when the experience of the story gives us the sense of having lived a complex and epic tale, full of unexpected turnarounds and interesting revelations. The ending felt a little bit dissapointing, with that new suggested complication – maybe aimed at giving cause for new stories set in the same world – that reminded me too much of american horror movies and their “final scare“.

As a side remark, I would add that the illustrations included in the book, by Edmundo Garing, are some of the best I’ve seen in any gamebook.

To sum up, a very good gamebook, showing how the genre has evolved since its “golden decade” in the eighties, aiming to a different kind of readers, and without any doubt a very appealing adquisition for the library of any lover of the genre.

Welcome to this new blog about gamebooks and any other form of interactive narration. My name is Pablo Martinez, a wannabe writer and fan of all forms of storytelling.

I hope to share with you here a little bit about the treasures I discover in this fascinating media, the new stories I read and the announcements I can share with you. Your opinions and comments are more than welcome, so feel free to share them with everyone!